Pushing the Polymetis aside, she sprang up and paced the long room, and gradually her eyes kindled, her cheeks burned, as ambition pointed to a possible future, of which, till this hour, she had not dared to dream; and hope, o’erleaping all barriers, grasped a victory that would make her name imperishable.

In her miscellaneous reading she had stumbled upon singular correspondences in the customs and religions of nations separated by surging oceans and by ages; nations whose aboriginal records appeared to prove them distinct, and certainly furnished no hint of an ethnological bridge over which traditions traveled and symbolisms crept in satin sandals.  During the past week several of these coincidences had attracted her attention.

The Druidic rites and the festival of Beltein in Scotland and Ireland, she found traced to their source in the worship of Phrygian Baal.  The figure of the Scandinavian Disa, at Upsal, enveloped in a net precisely like that which surrounds some statues of Isis in Egypt.  The man of rush sails used by the Peruvians on Lake Titicaca, and their mode of handling them, pronounced identical with that which is seen upon the sepulchre of Ramses III. at Thebes.  The head of a Mexican priestess ornamented with a veil similar to that carved on Eastern sphinxes, while the robes resembled those of a Jewish high-priest.  A very quaint and puzzling pictorial chart of the chronology of the Aztecs contained an image of Coxcox in his ark, surrounded by rushes similar to those that overshadowed Moses, and also a likeness of a dove distributing tongues to those born after the deluge.

Now, the thought of carefully gathering up these vague mythologic links, and establishing a chain of unity that would girdle the world, seized and mastered her, as if veritably clothed with all the power of a bath kol.

To firmly grasp the Bible for a talisman, as Ulysses did the sprig of moly, and to stand in the Pantheon of the universe, examining every shattered idol and crumbling, denied altar, where worshipping humanity had bowed; to tear the veil from oracles and sibyls, and show the world that the true, good and beautiful of all theogonies and cosmogonies, of every system of religion that had waxed and waned since the gray dawn of time, could be traced to Moses and to Jesus, seemed to her a mission grander far than the conquest of empires, and infinitely more to be desired than the crown and heritage of Solomon.

The night wore on as she planned the work of coming years, but she still walked up and down the floor, with slow, uncertain steps, like one who, peering at distant objects, sees nothing close at hand.  Flush and tremor passed from her countenance, leaving the features pale and fixed; for the first gush of enthusiasm, like the jets of violet flame flickering over the simmering mass in alchemic crucibles, had vanished—­the thought was a crystalized and consecrated purpose.

At last, when the feeble light admonished her that she would soon be in darkness, she retreated to her own room, and the first glimmer of day struggled in at her window as she knelt at her bedside praying: